The Unquiet (3 page)

T
he boys have started an argument with us. They follow behind us at a small distance. Nelson tells Greta, loudly, that the mosquito bites on her chest don't actually need a bra. (Somehow everyone always seems to be talking about breasts these days.) He asks why she bothers, wasting her time like that when she could go shirtless, and then we have to hold her back, to keep her from charging.

“What?” Nelson calls, laughing. “You're not strong enough to come over here?”

Greta fights harder to free herself, but there is nothing
she can do against all of us girls. She talks loudly about the size and shape of Nelson's head. “Like a watermelon,” she says, which is true.

“Leave it alone,” we tell her. “He's just trying to get you in trouble.”

Several more insults and curses pass between us. We are like this now. The girls against the boys, an only half-joking game. We have a saying: making friends with a boy is like dousing yourself in gasoline and then waiting in an empty field during a lightning storm. The older we get, the more we separate ourselves.

Something sits there between us all, you see. Something seductive and dangerous, certain boys giving certain girls looks that sometimes Madame catches.

We all lived in the same cottages, even the same rooms, until a few years ago, when the boys got their Sir. Now we are absolutely not permitted to frolic with members of the opposite sex. That is what Madame says in her shrill voice. But it happens anyway. It happens when she is not looking: a boy and a girl sneaking off, the sounds they make, the flushed looks they give each other in the morning. Some of the older girls, seventeen or eighteen, say, “I want to know what it feels like before they send us out there. I don't want any surprises, and I
don't want to feel like I missed out on anything.” For some of them, kissing seems to consume all of their leisure time.

And then there are the rest of us: prudish and proper in our uniforms, white shirts always buttoned, gray skirts always at least an inch below our knees, socks pulled up as high as they go. If we are missing anything, chances are we will never know what it is.

We arrive at the cottages and immediately break up to do various tasks. Some sit at the piano, some read books, some are in charge of dinner tonight, while others have the leisure of sleeping off their busy day. “The fridge and cupboards have been restocked,” Madame announces, and we know it must have been at great risk to her. It always is whenever she goes into the city for the things we need.

We sound like little schoolchildren, our voices harmonious when we murmur our “Thank you, Madame.”

She nods.

For all we know she was chased by a wild bear just now, but you would never know it from the way she strides off into her office, her best dress devoid of a single wrinkle, her brown leather shoes still shined, her bun still severely secured atop her head. “Stand tall,” she likes to say.
“
The ones who live the longest are always the proper ones.”

Our Madame is not what you might think; anyone who imagines her small must adjust her size to at least three times bigger, and if in your mind an ogre appeared, then you must think of a smaller, softer sort of woman who could not hurt a fly even if she wanted to. Madame is neither small nor big, neither powerful nor weak, but she owns us. She owns us in a way that we did not understand as children, still do not understand now. We respect her, are afraid of her, are enamored with her, are disgusted with her, all at once. She has a shrewd face and a sharp nose and eyes that are piercing. She is good to you at the exact same moment that she is cold. As long as she is standing in front of me, she is solid, but the moment she is gone, she becomes undefined in my mind. I suppose what we've decided, collectively, including the boys, is that as far as Madame goes, we do not really know what she is.

The smell of sizzling onions perfumes the air. The radio is on, our only connection to the outside world, and some of the girls are swaying to the music. We seem simple enough, yet we are not what we seem at all. A sort of violence sings in our bones, an unquietable hum just beneath the surface, like the fire of a volcano. Madame calls us carriers, for now. We only carry the ability to do what is required of us. When we pass all our exams, we will become sleepers.

We have been training for these exams since the moment we arrived; it is all we have lived for. When we have passed, when we are sleepers, we will leave this place. Until then we must remain hidden inside these woods. The problem, you see, with two versions of a person now existing in one world is this: someone might recognize us and mistake us for someone we are not, and then everything—coming here, hiding in their woods all these years—would have been for nothing. So we stay hidden until it is time to leave. That is the most important rule.

Tonight the conversation is easy. Jenny and Greta have just finished reading a book by Hemingway, and they are trying to recount the story to some other girl who has yet to finish it.

“Well, there is a man,” Jenny says.

“And there is the sea,” Greta says.

“And I swear to God, that's pretty much all that happens,” Jenny says.

I tune them out. The sunset sneaks up on us, turns everything gold for a moment before stealing away again. I am watching from the window, marveling at how it never gets old. We did not miss the windows when we were in the bunkers; that sort of thing is not important until suddenly it is. We do not take anything for granted now.

You ask, What is one cottage girl to another? We stand one another well enough to live together. But we have learned that the only way to protect ourselves is to trust no one else. We have been taught to be selfish. We are very good at it.

The radio continues to play, someone hums, someone else sets up a board game, and I watch Edith wash the dishes. I am still sitting on the windowsill by the kitchen sink, only half awake, the echoes of old memories beating at my tired chest. I wonder sometimes what someone standing in the dark outside our window might think if he looked, really looked, at us. Are we punctuated by our secrets? The question marks of the future, and all the exclamation points from the past?

You wouldn't know from our faces that the final examination is in a week. Afterward there might not be any of us left.

F
or as long as anyone can remember, there have been two planets. It was as easy to take for granted as the idea that we need air to breathe. Earth I and II. The original planet and its alternate. Everything has a reflection. It is only a matter of whether you can see it or not. The funny thing is that back home, on our planet, we were the first Earth. We were original, and they were alternates. Now this is Earth I, which means that I am second. I am the alternate. Everything is a matter of perspectives.

The two worlds look exactly the same. The sky is just as
blue; the cities are just as windy; the snow is just as white. Mirror images, yet two ways any single story can play out. When you were four years old, you were entered into the interplanetary registry. I was five the first time I spoke to my alternate via satellite.
“Bonjour,”
I said, to another girl named Lirael who lived in Paris, who looked like me, smiled like me. We were the same in almost every way and yet different in others. She giggled a lot. She never played with her hands, and no one had to remind her to look up or speak louder. The monthly satellite conversations were supposed to be a way for everyone to learn to be content with her lot in life. You start to think that if your life is so terrible here, maybe your fortune can be made elsewhere, and then you learn that your alternate took that route and her life is either better or worse for it. In the end, if you compare and contrast the two, their differences are either very few or very many. Most still live in the same look-alike cities, are still essentially the same person, but less commonly, some are so vastly different that they might be unrecognizable to each other. It didn't always make everyone content with their lives, but at least we knew what the other roads looked like. It turned out that the knowledge itself was the most powerful thing.

I think I had just turned six when relations finally broke
down. Six when it was no longer permitted for us to be in communication with our alternates. Interplanetary communications in general were cut off, and all there was of that other world was the dot in the sky. Suddenly I didn't know anything about Lirael and her life, and she knew nothing about me. What had been normal became something to fear, to worry about. Many said they'd always suspected it. That it is impossible for two parallel worlds to coexist indefinitely. That at every moment our two planets, atmospheres, even our stars are fighting each other and have been for years. There might be two versions of everything, but only one can stay. Only one reflection is real.

We call this period now, when the two planets officially no longer communicate, the Silence. It is harder for some—those older men and women who have known their alternates for sixty years, who feel like they have lost their best friends, their other halves. But even they understand that the Silence is meant to be a period of introspection. Even our presidents stopped speaking two years ago.

Earth I also meant it to be a period of good faith. A standstill. So that the two planets could each search for a better plan, one that might mean our two worlds wouldn't have to go up against each other.
The Silence.
That they even came up
with a standstill proves one thing to us: that the people of this world, of this Earth, are the better, moral versions of us. Their mistake is not understanding this and assuming that if you lock two people up in a prison with only one glass of water and a knife, the knife will lie where it is on the floor, untouched whether the water is still there or not.

At the end of the Silence, one Earth will fall; there can be no two ways about it.

By the time they realize that our sleeper program is in effect, that we are coming to take over their world, it will be too late.

I spend an hour in the training room before bed. The examination is in a week, and I am afraid to fail. There is nowhere for failed carriers to go, and so they are killed. I am not the only one here. The training room is full despite the time. It's hard to fall asleep when all you're thinking about is that you could die in a week. For some of us, what we do with this final week in the cottages will determine the value of our lives.
One week.
I swallow hard as I turn on the screen and watch footage of my alternate's life: her sitting for dinner with her family; her alone in her room. I watch the summarized footage of everything she has done today, doing my best to emulate her. To sit like she does and use the same hand
gestures. I do this every night. By the time I am finished the cottages are quiet. I stumble into my bed.

I close my eyes and let myself fall into that space between sleeping and waking. Sometimes I see an old man in my dreams who speaks to me, who has been there since I was young. If he is not there, then I do not dream. The old man is waiting for me again tonight. He should not be there because the children of Earth II no longer dream. They say it was a sign no one noticed. Sometimes, when we were younger and still friends, Edith would shake me awake each time I got too loud, thrashing in my sleep, in case one of the other girls heard. Now I have learned to be frozen and to scream silently inside myself no matter what I dream about. Sometimes I feel as though it is only inside these dreams that I am myself, with all my fears and weaknesses exposed. It is the only way to know me.

One week
, I think, and even in sleep I can feel my throat starting to close.

But I know who I am, I tell the old man.

Lirael.

My name, for as long as I have known it, is Lirael Harrison. I am fourteen years old, and I am from the other planet. I have spent the last eight years of my life in these woods, training
to become someone else, learning not to love the things that I love, not to want the things that I want, not to walk the roads that I would have. In the end I will be the version of Lirael that only the people of this world recognize. In the end, without a second thought, we will kill our alternates so that we can take over their lives here. There is no other choice. Some of the cities are already chock-f of sleepers. People who look and talk and act the same as they always did, who are not the same people at all, who are only pretending until all of this is over. People who trained where I have trained, who understand the importance of this mission and that many lives far greater than ours depend on our ability to stay secret, to never make mistakes, to always live two steps ahead. It is easier for the young ones like me, who did not grow up with their alternates, who can do the things that our parents cannot.

Madame likes to say, “Who says wars need to be fought with guns and bombs?”

T
here are fourteen girls in my group and nineteen boys, and we have been very careful over the years not to love one another. It is a mistake to grow attached to someone you might never see again. A mistake to make friends you cannot keep. To form bonds that will have to break. We could not understand this when we were younger. We held hands in the dark and told stories about our families and how scared we were to suddenly be here, not there. They'd taken us when we'd least expected it, rounded us up like animals without telling us why we were chosen or where we were
going until we were here in this world. It's possible that some children were volunteered by their parents, and it's possible that they were not. Who knows? Who has those insignificant memories anymore? It is the sort of thing that would be a burden to remember, a weight forever on your shoulders. All we could ever say for sure was that one moment we were in our houses, the next moment in dark vans, the next coming through the portal.

We used to have little confessionals. “They took me while I was shopping with my mother,” one boy would say. “They killed my mother, and
then
they took me,” someone else would say. Alex, of course. It was a game to see who had the worst story. I still don't know if any of Alex's stories were true, but they were always the worst, sometimes so bad I would even cover my ears, and he loved that, frightening me.

Madame hated us those first few months when we were stubborn and angry. When we would not eat or sleep when she ordered us to. “Why us?” we kept asking. “We don't want to be here. We want to go back through the portal. We want to go home.”

I don't remember her reply. I don't know if she even had one.

I am the youngest of all the carrier girls. Most are at least a year older than me. But Madame says we already have the
minds and the maturity of adults, and so that is how she treats us. She says our eyes are the window to our souls. When she looks, she sees only blackness there. That's how it's meant to be. That's what it means to be the stronger version of a person, the version that survives. Genetically, physiologically, we are the same as our alternates. Same brains, same DNA, except somehow for the darkness.

I remember one of the boys crying one night and the sound of it echoing through the room. It kept us all awake. Finally some of us climbed out of our bunks and surrounded his. His older sister, he said, had been sick and dying of cancer. He knew that he would never see her again. He could not stop crying. Someone hugged him, I think. Someone whose face I cannot remember because it is no longer here, because it has evolved into a face like mine, detached over time. I think back to that night often, how we comforted him, and I do not know whether we were better people then, but I know we were more like
them
. The people who live here in this world. The people who are not sure that they want our lives to end when we have already decided on theirs.

I linger a little when it's time to get up today. New children have replaced us in the bunkers, and I am supposed to be downstairs with them. It is the job I hate most of all, chasing
after them, making sure they don't injure themselves. It is not time for them to know yet. They have not realized who and what they are.

When the time comes, they are the ones who will break their own spirits.

There are still so many of them. They are as angry as we were, and I wonder whose heart they intend to cut out. Which way they plan to run once they're free: to the left or to the right?

There is nothing I won't trade with the other girls not to be on the schedule. Unfortunately all the others in my group feel the same. Still, I spend most of my chore time begging whenever Madame has her back turned. I am very good at popping up when I am least expected—on the other side of a fridge or out from a cupboard just before it's open. It's easier to beg someone you've just made laugh. It's the one time I intentionally make a fool of myself; I am desperate enough.

Finally I run into Margot, a tall, big-boned girl with her fluffy hair in ringlets. She's coming out of my room even though hers is the one across. “What are you doing?” I ask her, narrowing my eyes.

“Well, what's that in your hand?” she asks, one hand on her hip.

“Nothing,” we say at exactly the same time, dropping our best attempts at bribery inside our pockets. What other options do we have? How do we get out of this?

“I've hurt my leg,” Margot says, gesturing down. “I think maybe you should go downstairs without me.”

I let out a horrible cough. I say, “If you abandon me, I'm going to die of pneumonia right here on this floor. Do you want to see?”

She sighs, and her hair bounces on her head. “I swear those kids are worse than we ever were. Let's just go in there and present a united front. That always works for Jenny, and she's like a midget. The kids love her.”

“It's probably not smart to say that to her face, though,” Julia calls from her bed, with the air of someone who has all the knowledge in the world. Margot and I poke our heads back into the room and see her sitting with a book. “She might try to kill you in your sleep or poison you at dinner.”

“Are you speaking from experience?” Margot asks solemnly, even though I can tell she wants to laugh.

Julia lies back on her bed and mutters to herself. We're leaving, but I think I hear her say, “Even if I was, no one would do anything about it.”

Margot and I both look away. We cannot dispute it. Julia
knows she is less valuable to us and to Madame than Jenny.

The chance that Julia will be alive after our examinations is slim.

I follow Margot down the stairs. On the other side of the door there is yelling. I yank it open, and Edith looks grateful. She swears underneath her breath and stumbles past us, half dazed, as if she has been starved of fresh air. Inside the room there are several fights going on, and the kids are yelling at one another. Margot and I stay standing at the door. “So,” I hear myself say unenthusiastically, “I guess I'll take that corner and you can take the other side.”

“We were much better than them as kids, right?” Margot says.

“God, I hope so.”

She holds the door open, and I'm stupid enough to walk through it first. Naturally it shuts again behind me.

“I just need some time,” she says from the other side. “I just need one minute,” but I think she's really hoping that I'll settle the kids before she has to deal with them. Some of the other carriers are tougher than us, and meaner. They are the ones the children are afraid of. They are the ones who command fear and perfect silence, but I have not mastered the art of such cruelty. It is too fresh in my mind: the memory
of living in the bunkers, myself; the memory of how the older kids would punish us with their fists when we did not obey them. Alex is a firm believer in this method. “It's common sense,” he said once. “You show them what you're capable of a few times, without Madame ever knowing, of course, and then they learn to fear you.”

I'm a disappointment to Margot when she finally enters fifteen minutes later. She wrangles two angry seven-year-old boys apart and then howls in pain as they converge on her hair. Her voice is high and scratchy. “No,” she says. “Sit down. Don't do that. What is wrong with you people?”

A spitball lands on my neck. When I turn around, four dozen straight faces stare back at me, but the moment I look away again they're giggling, hands over their mouths. I run my hands through my hair, and more wads of paper stick to my fingers.

“Okay, who did that?” I ask, narrowing my eyes.

Nobody answers.

I shake my head. I am trying to seem angry, but the truth is that I envy them this. I think both Margot and I do. This camaraderie will not last forever, will not even last much longer than today.

“Everyone, please sit at your information desks and put
on your headphones,” I say, gesturing to the cubicles with small white screens protruding from them.

“I don't feel like it,” one of the boys, a notorious troublemaker, says.

I ignore him. He changes his mind when I reach for a box of biscuits on the shelf and pass it around. “Only if you are sitting at your cubicle,” I say, and I breathe a sigh of relief when he reluctantly obeys. Bribery is my only friend downstairs. When they are finally seated, I flick the switch that turns the screens on and watch their eyes glaze over as they are given information, each of them something different, some history that will help them take over their alternates' lives when they are older. This is how it begins: hours of surveillance, of learning about the way your alternate walks, talks, sleeps, laughs until it enters you and you cannot breathe anything else, until you become that person, and then the real training sessions begin. By the time these children are eleven years old, they too will know how to kill.

There are sleepers whose sole task is to collect the information needed for training. To plant cameras and compile it all into data that play on these small screens. We don't know much about them, and I suppose we never will since they are little more than background noise to our lives.

While the children watch the screens, Margot and I sit by
the door, flicking through books and magazines. I have two more to read before I am ready for my literacy test, before I know exactly the same amount of information that
she
does. I cross my legs and work with a highlighter. For a while the room is unnaturally quiet. There are no sounds from upstairs, no smells, no voices. Down here the younger carriers are not even sure whether it is day or night; they only know what we tell them: that when they have proved that they are willing to learn, to train, they will be allowed upstairs.
But they are not all ready yet
, I think, looking around the room at the rebellious ones, the angry ones.

Some are almost ready, though.

A girl named Lillian-Grace smiles at me whenever I look her way. She is much too old for the teddy bear she clutches in her hand, the thumb she sticks in her mouth, yet I think she could have been me. She has the same look of terror, of uncertainty in her eyes, although it grows dimmer every day. It is as though we understand each other. I would not be surprised to learn that she also does not know who her parents are, that for her this bunker is infinitely better than the orphanage they took her from back on the other Earth. I wink at her, and she flashes her missing teeth at me before turning back to her screen.

Margot and I have five days left; less than that. Five days before our time here is over, and we are torn between the things we want to do and the things we should be doing. Margot flinches when I lean over to see her book. The one she shouldn't be reading falls out from between the pages. But when I smile, she smiles embarrassedly back at me. “Do you think we'll be any good at this?” she asks quietly, and I notice for the first time that her eyes are blue with flecks of green in them. How is it possible that in eight years I have never noticed such an obvious thing? Why am I noticing now?

I shrug. “If we're not, the testing will kill us.”

She plays with her hair. I can tell that she is not satisfied with this answer. “Do you think we'll miss this place after we've left?” And then before I can answer, she blurts, “I know a boy and a girl who love each other. Who say they can't help it.” Her cheeks are bright red, and she does not look at me when she says this.

My mouth falls open. “Did you tell Madame?”

She plays with the corner of her book. “I was going to. I don't want any trouble.”

We fall silent. We both know she should have told. I realize suddenly that she is fighting the urge to cry, and I don't know what to say, how to comfort her.

Love each other? Why would anyone be so stupid? Even the ones who sneak into each other's beds, who kiss and secretly hold hands, live under no delusions of some happily ever after. We are not here to love. I stare at Margot until she gets herself back under control, and then she shakes her head. “Dumbasses,” she mutters viciously. “Let them get what is coming to them.”

I nod my agreement. This boy and this girl Margot knows, I am sure there have been countless others like them before us, and there will be more after. Perhaps even now in this room, with these children, two of them will lock eyes and decide on each other in irrevocable ways and choose their emotions over their world, their lives. It happens. They are sheep who fall out of the flock, who do not have what it takes to survive this world like we are meant to.

They won't pass the testing. It is the most excruciating examination any of us will go through, designed to weed out our mistakes and to eliminate those who are not up to par. They do not have even the slightest hope of passing it.

Margot and I refocus our eyes on our books, both of us shaking our heads in disgust, both of us silent.

Love is what
they
have. The people of this Earth. Not us. Look how weak it has made them.

I am afraid that my ability to dream will make me weak, too.

I cannot figure out why this particular man is stuck in my head. I remember his face from the orphanage. I was four or five years old, and he was a janitor. I tripped over his mop one day, and when he helped me up, I heard him say under his breath, “You poor, poor children.”

I froze. It was the way he'd said it. Before that moment it had not occurred to me. That I was something to be pitied, but after that I never forgot it.

A few nights later the alarms in the orphanage went off. The man ran into our room with a rifle in his hand. He ran right up to the girl in the bed next to mine. “My name is Emilio Dupuy,” he told her. “Your name is Elsa Dupuy, and I am your grandfather. Your parents do not want you, but I do. I am here to take you home with me.”

He did not have to say much more than that. She went into his arms willingly. Not because she believed him—she probably didn't—but she was like any orphan there. We all wanted to belong to someone, and we didn't even really care who that person might be. Nothing could be worse, we thought, than the orphanage.